[WSMDiscuss] Fwd: "We are Humans not Robots"

[Estelle Fein]

Some facts that justify my hatred of Amazon 






Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

> From: PM Press <newsletter at pmpress.org>
> Date: April 12, 2019 at 8:45:56 AM PDT
> To: leef at cruzio.com
> Subject: "We are Humans not Robots"
> Reply-To: joey at pmpress.org
> 
> 
> 
>   ‌   ‌
> View as Webpage
> 
> 
> "After yet another speed-up in a workplace notorious for its lightning pace of work, workers at a Minnesota Amazon warehouse walked off the night shift for three hours.
> "The March 7 walkout at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota, was these workers’ second job action in three months.
> "The strikers work in the stow department, shelving items after they have been unloaded from inbound trucks and processed. Racing against a literal countdown clock, stowers have to find vacant space for incoming merchandise throughout the 850,000-square-foot warehouse.
> "Hanging over the heads of stowers are twin standards: “rate” and “errors.”"
> —Joe DeManuelle-Hall of Labor Notes
> 
> The median salary for Amazon employees is $28,000 a year. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos currently makes around $275 million a day ($11.5 million per hour, $191,666 per minute, or $3,182 every second). This means Bezos, now worth $150 billion, makes more in ten seconds than the average Amazon employee makes all year.
> 
> It would cost $10 billion a year to bring pure water to the entire world. And approximately $30 billion a year to end world hunger.
> Bezos himself could provide the world with clean water for the next 15 years. Or, end world hunger for 5 straight years.
> 
> In a recent study, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that Amazon won't pay any federal income tax for the second year in a row, even though profits doubled to $11.2 billion in 2018. Instead, Amazon will be getting a 2018 federal income tax rebate of $129 million, which "works out to a tax rate of negative 1%."
> 
> According to the same study, Amazon and its third-party vendors sold some $189 billion worth of goods in 2018 alone, and those sales accounted for:
> ~900,000 displaced retail jobs.
> ~$5.5 billion to $7 billion in uncollected sales tax.
> 
> Analyzing the most recent numbers for the independent bookstore channel nationwide, this same study reports that approximately 28 percent of all revenue of indie bookstores immediately recirculates in the local economy.
> This translates into a massive local impact advantage of 610 percent over Amazon (which recirculates only 4 percent locally).
> 
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